Speaking at CouchConf Boston

I will be giving a presentation on Entity Relationships in a Document Database at CouchConf Boston on May 15th. The talk description:

Unlike relational databases, document databases like CouchDB and Couchbase do not directly support entity relationships. This talk will explore patterns of modeling one-to-many and many-to-many entity relationships in a document database. These patterns include using an embedded JSON array, relating documents using identifiers, using a list of keys, and using relationship documents.

Additionally, this talk will address how each entity relationship pattern equates to its equivalent in a relational database. I’ll be discussing the relevant differences between document databases and relational databases such as:

Document databases do not have tables

Each document can have its own schema

There is no built-in concept of relationships between documents

Views/indexes are queried directly instead of being used to optimize more generalized queries

A column within a result set can contain a mix of logical data types

There is typically no support for transactions across document boundaries